Urizen, character in the mythology of William Blake. A godlike figure, Urizen personifies reason and law, and Blake believed him to be the true deity worshipped by his contemporaries. Blake first told Urizen’s story, the struggle against the chaos caused by the loss of a true human spirit, in the so-called “Prophetic Books,” including America, a Prophecy (1793), The Book of Urizen (1794), and The Song of Los (1795), and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala, or The Four Zoas, written from approximately 1796 to 1807. In an engraving from Europe, a Prophecy (1794), Blake depicts Urizen as a grim scientist, creating the Earth with a huge pair of compasses.

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Nov. 28, 1757 London, Eng. Aug. 12, 1827 London English engraver, artist, poet, and visionary, author of exquisite lyrics in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and profound and difficult “prophecies,” such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), The First...

...were not likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and to construct a new mythology centred not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen, a repressive figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by his contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First...